Deep Aware Triads is a process or method, an attempt to translate complex systems and phenomena into images through collaboration with artificial intelligence. It involves a process for making digital collages based on the diagrams of artificial neural networks. For each subject matter, the artist makes image databases that accumulate hundreds of images and diagrams from stock photograph archives and academic research papers. Utilizing these research materials as a source, the artist misuses the AI-powered functions in image processing software to blend boundaries of digital images with machine-calculated pixels. Images encroach on each other as digital bodies, creating unexpected and obscure brushes and textures. Resembling a microscopic view, the final work with intricate details appears to stimulate a kind of algorithmic pareidolia.

vivirvivirvivir (2020 – 2021) researches and foregrounds the agencies of viral systems as means and metaphor through the biological, the computational, and the linguistic. Saudade (2019 – 2020) is about the phenomena of Saudade, which “names the presence of absence and takes melancholy delight in what’s gone”, through researching the paradoxes and relationships between migration, tourism, and existentialism. As the first set of work employing this process, orishormonaspina (2019) explores how technology makes an impact on different systems inside the human body by attributing a chosen theme and associated keywords to each painting: Oral (oris), Hormonal (hormona), Spinal (spina).

(‘ve) said a mouthful v1 is an interactive poem coded as a web application. A dataset of found English onomatopoeia words and one of default HTML color names are mapped onto a 10 x 10 grid and shuffled through clicking. When the mouse hovers over the individual grid, the browser’s text-to-speech feature would be triggered to read the word iterating through 47 different voices from different regions around the world. Reading English’s roman spelling from the mouths of 47 different languages generates new phonetic possibilities and (un)meanings.

Interactions: unmute to listen, click to shuffle, hover to voice, move to thread, stay to choir.

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01_ tethering.wav 2’50” 02_ taming.wav 2’30” 03_ transcending.wav 2’30” –>

received from recycled electronic wastes ~ (electromagnetic signals made audible) ~ received by recycled electronic wastes

My body is connected to a system of interfaces and sensors that translate the brainwave signals collected from my sleep into visuals and sounds. The visuals that are responsive to the brainwave data transition between choreographed body movements, while the same set of bio-data modulates the song L’Internationale as a standard of the international communist movement.

The core of the work is a performance of “doing-nothing”. It is a visual and sonic anthem of fatigue and frustration, a useless polemic to the over-demand of productivity in a reality where acts of “doing-nothing” such as relaxation have been exploited to produce surplus value. The act of “doing nothing” in this work is an act of passive disengagement when lethargy becomes the productivity of useless labouring that is at the same time oversimplified and regulated by bio-cybernetic feedback loops.
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“What Lets Lethargy Dream Produces Lethargy’s Surplus Value is a performance that simulates a synesthetic experience by translating bio-data into visuals and sounds. The artist relies on a retroactive system, using an electroencephalogram (EEG) and sensors, to pick up bioelectric signals from her body while in a sleep state. Meanwhile, the artist listens to the generated sounds, creating a feedback reflex to her dream state. Various data is then processed through a computer program that generates an artificial universe, revealing the extent of these involuntary reflex actions. These are calculated by the computer in the form of binary codes, which are then associated with synaesthetic images and sounds. Presented as a hymn to chronic fatigue, What lets lethargy dream produces lethargy’s surplus value extends onto the reflections of the performance series, Allegorical Circuits for Human Software, and invites us to review the relationship we have with our bodies, as digital speed amplifies both the acceleration of the world and our emotional exhaustion.”  — Laurie Cotton Pigeon
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All Tomorrow’s Oceans is Xuan Ye’s multimedia art project that manifests “oceanic desire” through computational and improvisational image and sound making. The contradictory connotation of the title lies in that the ocean is an idea beyond individual human experiences and spacetime. “All Tomorrow’s” expresses a timeless vision of symbiosis with nature, from the past to the present, and an ultimate nostalgia towards the ocean. In the audiovisual performance, the improvised soundscape renders primarily human voice with one microphone as the only input, through which the artist mimics whale vocalization and sequences the sounds in recursive rhythmic patterns that are common in humpback whale songs. The sound-reactive visuals are morphing pixels generated through an AI algorithm and a custom database that the artist collected by searching the keywords “ocean” in commercial stock photograph archives. It is the idea of “ocean” or the “oceanic desire” that is controlled by the representational power and cultural authority of the stock image ecosystem, while the bio-political control is compounded by the algorithmic economy.

S.Q.U.I.R.R.E.L.S. is a score and web app that pulls animated gifs from the GIPHY database using two sets of keywords: one set is based on animals, the other on distinct body languages. As an instructional visual score, S.Q.U.I.R.R.E.L.S. is open for musicians and dancers to interpret GIFs as the smallest units that compose variations and pulses. As a web-based application, S.Q.U.I.R.R.E.L.S. collages and considers GIFs as found moving images that are visual specimens of contemporary tropes and symbols, and our collective behavior patterns.

Predictable uncertain time is programmed in this score-app, querying an indexed database that is built in extracted events, memories and wants. It creates a synesthetic language that is dynamically generative and does not stop making new meanings. Originally based on an English idiom, this work attempts to address that to find is to locate a nut, to land on the signified. The truth or the only perfect mapping is indiscutable when a musician interprets a visual score, or when human associates gestures with movements of animals.

The Universal Serial Bus is an easy-listening trip to be heard but not listened to. The hours-long ambient sounds in the release are field recordings that are processed through X’s learnt listening patterns. Perceiving the surrounding spectrum in harmonics, X tunes the body as an interface to the recorded fields. At the nexus of noise and music, the USB is an extension to X’s long term project in the sonic banality of “useless music”, a counterproductive twist to muzak’s total design of background music.

“I would describe it as listening to great music in a room surrounded by very little music. When you feel it, USB sounded the best. From warped machine sounds, to the triumphant electromagnetic-samples, to the mysterious windy signal jam, USB gives me the sense of an ordinary person going about his life.”

“…a similar sound fingerprint for ‘households’, ‘streets and ‘birds’ had already been found, but offered no further details as to the sound sources. IKEA also included various USBs for their showrooms, including its kitchens, living rooms and other interior spaces. Some of the combinations of these natural-sounding sounds could be an alternative to listening to it in the room itself, especially in quiet environments”

“In this sense, it is something passive; its accompaniment by sound is intended to be a marginal piece of sound, a discreet vehicle that might be better understood as an editorial device than as a potential repository of music.”

In 2016, one of South Korea’s most high-profile Go players, Lee Sedol, was challenged by an AI player, fittingly named AlphaGo. In order to defeat one of the strongest players in the history of the strategy board game, AlphaGo was allegedly powered by 1920 CPUs and 280 GPUs. ERROAR!#1, a part of the ERROAR! series, simulates a hybrid (augmented-audiovisual) space that features 1920 images of CPUs and 280 images of GPUs to materialize AlphaGo’s hardware use, or its “brain capacity” on a 1-1 scale.

The Spectacles Before Us Were Indeed Sublime depicts a fictional voyage on a cruise ship named E. Bending spacetime in a first-person view, Spectacles uses cruise imagery as a speculative vantage point for re-imagining the colonial past in the shared present, and gestures towards the cultural implications of maritime voyage as not only the starting point of modern global colonialism, but of segregated diaspora and migration more broadly. On the metaphysical level, Spectacles researches the ocean as an archetype of the unconscious that is in constant transmutation and translates the oceanic as tangible experiences channeling the planetary sensorium from a perspective that is towards an ontology of wave.

Related exhibition/text: filling the Klein bottle